


A life ago

by Kay_N_K8



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Divergent Timelines, F/M, Fantasy, Fluff and Angst, Humor, Mention of sex, mention of abortion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:35:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24228952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kay_N_K8/pseuds/Kay_N_K8
Summary: Emily Rose is haunted by strange visions of people she has never known or seen. And probably never could as they definitely existed somewhere in the past. Intensifying, these visions make her insane day after day, keeping her exhausted and awake at night. Does it have any connection with her new boyfriend, Alex, or is she just going mad?
Relationships: Alex Høgh Andersen/Original Female Character(s), Ivar (Vikings)/Original Female Character(s), Ivar/Aoife, Rosaline/Gilbert
Kudos: 7





	A life ago

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! :) This is my first attempt of writing a fanfiction in English. It's not my mother tongue, so please inform me if there're any grammar or other mistakes!!! You are very welcome to do so as I'm so much eager to improve it! 
> 
> I hope you will enjoy this work! :)
> 
> Have a nice day!

Amy’s phone beeped. She gave it a quick look, not even unblocking it.

'They're coming’, she took a long drag and pressed her cigarette into the glassy ashtray, her lime colored nails glowing in the luminescent light. Emily nodded hopelessly. She was definitely neither up nor down to new acquaintances.

‘I’ve got some things to do tomorrow’.

‘So you will do them tomorrow. Chill, Em! Besides, Jack’s got rather hot friends, you’ll see’.

‘Amy, it’s still not the right time for hot friends, seriously’, Emily smiled sighing. Her intentions for tonight were drinking and complaining about her misfortune, not hot guys. Not even hot girls. Just two of them.

‘Is that because of Dave? Oh, come on! Stop acting like a widow! He’s an asshole, not dead’, she gestured to the barman for two Mojitos.

It was the first time for quite a long that she finally found some strength for going out. Since she and Dave broke up she spent one month crying and the next suddenly dedicated herself head first to studies at the university, probably eager to keep up with what was missing for all the years. She took up everything. Everything to keep him off her mind. Amybeth did quite a job to drag her out of her solitude. Out of their dorm room, to be exact.

Sure, Amy was rude as always, but bitterly right. That’s what he is. An asshole and a cheating bitch, a weak voice of her mind was telling her. Still didn’t sound convincing enough but it was different for now anyway as mentioning his name didn’t hurt her as much as it used to. 

Emily took a sip of her cocktail. Alright, hot guys then.

It didn’t take them a lot to get to the bar. Amy seemed to notice them even before they did. She waved at the three guys entering the door and throwing a glance back at Emily she ran to them. 

A guy wearing a black jacket and a white T-shirt gave Amy a gentle kiss on the lips and looked at Emily slowly approaching their company. He quickly examined her with his dark twinkling eyes. His spiky black, almost raven, hair and pale face but slightly blushing cheeks made his appearance quite vivid and bold. 

‘Well, meet Emily’, Amy laughingly pointed at her friend.

‘Are you that Emily Rose? Fuck me, what a name’, her boyfriend laughed. ‘Amy told about you a lot’, huh, no wonder, she always talks a lot. ‘This is Cody and Alex’

Cody was rather handsome and quite tall. His head was close-shaven with slightly grown brittle hair. It was still hard to tell what color it was but, judging by his complexion, his hair might be fair or ash brown. He was wearing black sweatpants and an orange T-shirt with some sport club print right in the middle of his broad chest. The other one in a grey hoodie and jeans must be Alex. He was a bit shorter than Cody but seemed quite sporty as well. Hands in pockets, his sleeves carelessly pulled up, baring his strong arms with veins. His big blue eyes were gazing at her attentively while being introduced, making Emily blush. His hair was done in a neat bun and shaven at the sides what made his tanned face with high cheekbones even more prominent as if being perfectly sculptured of a stone. Well, maybe Amy didn’t lie about hot guys after all.

‘Emily Rose is your real name? Wow, That’s creepy’, Cody sneered. Hilarious. No, that’s not creepy. You all and your jokes are what is creepy. Hearing something like this a thousand times about your name automatically makes it not funny. Should she consider that as a certain ritual when making friends?

Emily laughed. Turned out a bit colorless. Okay, whatever.

Alex raised his brow in a frustration.

‘What is that of her name?’

‘Come on, man, ain’t never seen that movie? About the devils and the stuff? What’s its name? ‘The exorcism of Emily Rose’ or something?’

‘Ah… Got it. Yeah, I’ve heard something. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, though’, he smiled kindly, his eyes fixed at her. Really? Guess we’re going to get on.

Emily was trying to do her best not to stare but couldn’t help it. His face was painfully familiar; she could swear she had met him before. Not at the university, apparently. He was rather sweet, and all the sweet guys sooner or later became the targets for Amy’s and her chitchats, so yes, she would have noticed him for sure. Okay, maybe they ran across each other once in the street or something like that, but she definitely recognized the pale scar on his right cheek.

‘Hey, I know you!’ he slightly narrowed his incredibly blue eyes. ‘Repton church? Last month?’

‘Ah, exactly!’, so easy, huh.

‘Church? Are you guys like fanatics?’ Jack looked at them mockingly.

‘Volunteers, actually’, Emily smiled.

‘Yes, at least, we were trying to help, you lazy bastard’, Alex laughed. Suddenly Emily thought he might not be from England at all as his slightly hard consonants betrayed his foreign origin. Irish, maybe? Doesn’t look like one, though.

Emily belonged to a volunteering organization at their university. Last month they and a few other universities really visited that small town as a part of a fundraising campaign. They were trying to get money Repton government, unfortunately, wasn’t eager to grant for restoration of the church. Sure thing, they could hardly hope for solving the problem immediately but, at least, they managed to appeal to people’s attention.

‘You were taking pictures, right?’

'Yea, have you seen them?’

‘Of course! They’re awesome!’

To be honest, when going there she didn’t really care about the church, it was just an attempt to keep herself busy. And it was quite exciting to recollect the events of that day through someone else’s perspective. Judging by the quality of photos, Alex wasn’t new in this field. His eyes and his camera captured picturesque beauties making her literally experience a tremendous sense of awe she didn’t feel back then. There was a certain aesthetic in the old brick chapel only a few years away from being ruined. Alex was attempting to picture the moment in which everything and everyone was alive. Every photo was breathing and living and moving with its own story in each.

Probably for him it wasn’t hard to remember her as there were enough pictures she was in. She wasn’t posing on purpose, of course. They were random photos where she was either looking away or talking to someone. Although being critical to herself each time it came to choose a successful photo she had to admit there were a few quite good pictures of her that she even thought of using one of them for her Facebook page. There were doubtlessly a bunch of girls striving madly to be captured by the camera. Hard to say if they really wanted to get good pictures or were charmed by the photographer’s charisma and wanted his attention. In any case, motionless and unnatural, these photos were black sheep among all others, falling out of the perfect animate history pages. Admiring the pictures could have been much more pleasant, if she hadn’t had to swipe those cam models all the time. The photos were brilliantly retouched, though. He did his job greatly and professionally, but at what cost? Not that he didn’t know it was inevitable, anyway. Giving credit to his talent, Emily still might humbly suppose that he probably had either a weak point or just took no interest in non-conceptual shots.

As their company has slightly enlarged, they had to move to a free table. Alex wasn’t a shy type apparently and with no hesitations sat right beside her. Emily really didn’t mind as long as they had something to talk about except for her name. Amy at the other side of the table was gesturing at her and Alex with her eyebrows so intensively that Emily was worried that her friend’s eyes and forehead might hurt. Though Emily herself was no less than her friend impressed that she got preoccupied by her newly acquaintance so easily.

The waiter (wow, they have waiters here? She didn’t notice sitting at the bar table) brought three bottles of beer, cracking them with an opener and catching the caps with his nimble fingers, and two raspberry martinis for the girls poured in exquisite stemmed glasses, which seemed to beat the price of the cocktails.

‘Not mead’, Jack shook his bottle in a fake disappointment, ‘But I hope beer is alright for you? Bet, them guys in Denmark don’t drink anything weaker than ale’.

‘Yeah, ale? You mean our traditional Danish morning drink?’ Alex laughed.

Emily smiled. Ah, right. He is from Denmark after all. That explains why she thought there was something weird about his accent.

‘Well, Skoll!’ apparently paying the tribute to his Danish ancestors, he announced raising his bottle. They cheered at the idea and …

And it all changed with a cling, as the bottles and glasses touched each other they suddenly acquired a different shape and look. Emily saw pairs of hands holding the black horns encircled by golden and silver rims with long thin chains hanging at their sides. The fingers wrapping them were muddy. She looked at Alex. The sight of him gave her cold shivers as he was not himself right now. His hair was twisted into ragged braids more reminding thick ropes. His face once smooth and handsome was now stained with dirt and dry blood. He gave her a quick look, grinning with his white smile that now resembled one of a beast rather than of a human. But the picture died away once she blinked. She felt a pang of sickness. Her head gave a spin as if she fell asleep and then was roughly thrown out of her dream.

With large eyes she kept staring at everyone, now back to normal. Shifting her gaze she saw Amy looking at her in confusion. Probably her sudden shock wasn’t left unnoticed.

‘Em, are you alright?’ her friend whispered in a worried tone, bending to her over the table. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost’.

‘I…I…’, she shook her head and blinked once again just to be sure she is still in the bar in the middle of England, not in some medieval inn. ‘Yeah, I’m okay. Just…’ not able to explain herself she shook her hand to avoid any other questions.

Still frozen from the shock, she was trying to calm her racing heart down. To seem mad with the guys she’s just met was definitely not what she really wanted right now.

Okay, she's been too hard on herself lately. She definitely needs to chill. She instantly remembered that the wild warrior sitting beside her instead of Alex was the one she’s been seeing in her dreams for more than a month. But since when has she become so imaginative to recreate it so clearly? Every time when she saw him in her dreams, Emily was sure she knew his face but as her mind was desperately clutching those familiar traits it always blurred and slipped away eventually. They were restless dreams, loud and sharp. And she hated waking up after those dreams that made her exhausted, regardless how long she’d slept. Maybe the stress was the reason for it as she has been feeling depressed lately. No matter how hard she tried, Dave was constantly on her mind, and the sharp knife of those bitter memories of how happy they used to be together was cutting her bloodlessly inside. So maybe, it was all of him. At least, that’s what she thought to persuade herself she was not going crazy being tortured by the same dream every night.

Before leaving the bar the guys who had had not enough of beer, took some shots that made them even more cheerful and to keep together a bit longer tried to persuade some poor Uber driver in all possible ways to pack them all in his misfortunate Renault.

When got into the car, Emily found herself squeezed mercifully between Alex and Jack with Amy on his laps. If the back seat was broader, could they possibly spread their legs wider, she was wondering angrily. Alex released his right arm and put it above Emily’s shoulder. That was a bit awkward but there was nothing neither she nor he could do as the car was packed so tightly that the position of all of them was far from being comfortable itself.

As he was searching for her Instagram page, she thought if it was okay for him to flip through his phone with his left hand while his right arm was resting on the seat beside her. She was feeling his strong muscular arm around her shoulders and her back. He was casually pressing her tighter to his side and their resemblance of a happy couple was so strong that Emily was afraid to look at Amy, being too embarrassed to meet her smirking face.

As the others were amusing the poor driver guy, who was definitely regretting to have agreed to pick them all up, with some drunken talks, Alex and Emily were still chatting with each other, paying little attention to what was happening around them.

When the car finally stopped at the dorm, Emily unable to resist had to make a promise to Alex to dm him as soon as she wakes up.

Once she got into the room, she flopped down on her bed and opened her Instagram with a notification of a new subscriber. Very few pictures of Alex himself, though, mostly photos of people or nature taken by him.

She swiped to a photo simply marked ‘England’ of a vast sunlit field with a soft carpet woven with blue bells and yellow-headed dandelions, tall dark green trees standing far in the distance. She couldn’t explain what attracted her but she could swear she almost inhaled the hot air of the blazing sun and felt the warm breath of the soft wind blowing small drops of the sweat away from her face; her feet sank in the grass so tall it was tickling the tips of her fingers. There was a certain magic in the picture Emily was bewitched with. It was unnaturally captivating and sinking her in.

The ceiling and the room span, she suddenly felt small inside the whirl of her thoughts. She was falling through the universe, a little dot among the scattered blue flower-shaped stars. Blue as eyes. His eyes. Wide open, filled with horror or hatred, his lips moving, his words drowning in the sea of a thousand voices screaming, shouting, whispering, crying mingling with metal screeching. His voice was somewhere among them but couldn’t break the wall of the sounds in her ears. Her head was up, she was not falling anymore but his face was getting further and further away. She was lying pinned to the ground trying to raise her head, trying to see trough her half-closed lids, unable to move not even a finger, pain somewhere under her chest growing unbearable, dragging her downwards. Was she dying? She couldn’t figure if she was scared of the thought as the vortex of emotions was overflowing. She fell again hitting the back of her head hard.

Gasping for air, Emily opened her eyes. She looked at her phone, it was about 4 am. Amy was breathing calmly in her bed on the other side of the room. Emily’s head and stomach hurt. She winced from pain, turning in her bed to make herself comfortable. She shouldn’t have drunk so much of fizzy alcohol. She has almost forgotten what effect it has on her. She grabbed a glass of water she’d put there before falling asleep, and what she was grateful herself for, from the table. It helped but a little. At last, however, her mind found the rest it desired so much. As the face of the warrior wasn’t a blurred spot anymore. Even now Emily could recollect every single detail of him.

Because it was Alex.

**Author's Note:**

> This idea came to me after listening to the beautiful song 'A thousand years' by Christina Perri. 
> 
> Maybe it will give you some hints on what's going on in here :)
> 
> Enjoy!


End file.
